Bell’s Seasoning & The Key to Thanksgiving

Introduction

Can any interesting new sentence be formed using the words “holiday” and “tradition?”  Probably not, so I’m going to chuck the junior high writing guidelines, skip the topic sentence, and just dive right in.

Eye-rolling

In my family, the run-up to Thanksgiving always involves some eye-rolling by my wife.  She almost never rolls her eyes at my utterances, with a few notable exceptions.  If I use certain automotive terms (e.g., “synchromesh,” “constant-velocity joint”) she rolls her eyes … or when I start going on about Bell’s Seasoning.

If you’re not familiar with Bell’s Seasoning, your mother probably doesn’t love you.  I’m sorry to be so harsh, but it needs to be said.  There is only one use for this product, and that’s as an ingredient in stuffing.  (If your mom calls stuffing “dressing,” she probably hates you and you’re at some risk for Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.)  I say Bell’s Seasoning is “an ingredient” but really it’s the ingredient (although it’s also critical that your mom bake fresh cornbread, which she then cubes and sets out to get just the right degree of stale, to mix with other stale bread for the stuffing).

If your mom doesn’t cook your Thanksgiving dinner, things get much more complicated.  More on that later.

How crucial is Bell’s Seasoning?

Bell’s Seasoning is easy to find in New England and the Northeast, but elsewhere it can be tricky.  My mom can’t find it in Oregon, where she lives now, though she never had any trouble when we lived in Boulder (where I grew up).  I had to really hunt for it when I lived in San Francisco, but it’s not too hard in the Berkeley area.  Still, I get a little nervous every year when I need to buy it.

A few nights ago my wife and kids joined me for a Post-Prandial Promenade^TM to Andronico’s Park & Shop, the store that had Bell’s last year.  This place is so expensive I cannot normally go in there.  (I once encountered this hippy-dippy woman there who was buying a foil pan of grilled asparagus that cost over $70.)

During the walk I fielded the inevitable question, this time from my daughter, “Is this seasoning really that important?”  I said, “Suppose you were an astronaut about to go on a spacewalk.  Would you think of going out there without your space suit?  Would you get bored of the same old space suit routine, and say, ‘You know what?  I’m just going out with a SCUBA mask this time.  I’ll probably be fine’?”  Before I had a chance to finish my little analogy, I realized that nobody was listening.

My wife has either heard it all before, or feels like she has.  It’s become something of a holiday tradition for her to grouse good-naturedly about how much dialogue surrounds this Bell’s Seasoning.  She has a point; in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving I always have several phone calls with my mom about Bell’s.  A typical call might go something like this:

            I’ll say, “So, I don’t have the Bell’s Seasoning yet—Safeway doesn’t have it anymore—but I’m sure I’ll be able to get it.”

            My mom will respond, “Well, I actually have two half-boxes of it in the freezer.  So if you can’t find it that’s no big deal … I think these will work.”

            “No, no, I don’t want to risk it.  Don’t worry, I’ll be able to find it.”

            “I think it does okay in the freezer.  I think I’ve done that before.”

            “You know what?  I just discovered have a box of it here, but it’s only half-full and it’s been in the spice rack, not the freezer.  No, I just smelled it and it’s no good.  I think it’s from last time we hosted Thanksgiving here.  Don’t worry, I’ll be able to find a fresh box.  I’ll definitely bring one.”

Perhaps I derive excessive pleasure from this subject because procuring Bell’s is basically the only thing I do to help out with the Thanksgiving meal.  As a modern husband/father who does a lot of the housework (and even a modest amount of the cooking), I take great pleasure in being almost useless on Thanksgiving Day.

The secret of Bell’s

So what’s Bell’s’ secret?  That’s a tough question, for a couple of reasons.  First of all, I’m not at all sure about the apostrophes I’ve just used.  I could have put “Bells’” but the mere act of suggesting it has caused another problem, that of running an apostrophe right up against a quotation mark, which is grammatically fine, but which (at my age) I realize lots of people have trouble with, due to spotty eyesight, so I try to go easy.  The other problem with “Bells’” is that it connotes “belonging to or associated with the Bells,” which isn’t at all what I mean.  And “Bell’s” connotes “belonging to or associated with Bell,” which is probably worse.  I need to convey “belonging to or associated with Bell’s [seasoning].”

The other problem is, I’m not a chef.  I know enough to say, “This food would taste better with more salt,” but when we’re talking about what to add to a bunch of dried out bread to achieve that amazing apotheosis into a food as uncannily delicious as stuffing, I’m completely out of my depth.  And yet, I think I do have one theory about why Bell’s is crucial.

The fact is, Bell’s imparts a flavor that is not only pleasant, but totally unique.  Stuffing itself doesn’t taste like anything else we eat, and my mom’s stuffing doesn’t taste like any other stuffing I’ve ever had.  (Don’t take this for granted.   Consider those ten-page Chinese menus where the same sauce is presented in the poultry, seafood, beef, and pork sections.)  This morning I waved the open box of Bell’s in front of my daughter’s nose and she said, “Mmmmm, that so smells like stuffing.”

So, had my mom used Mrs. Dash in her stuffing since I was a kid, would I be blogging about that product instead?  Of course not.  That stuff is a) inferior, and b) used in various foods, not just stuffing (at least, by those who use it, whoever they are).

What is at stake

Okay, Bell’s makes stuffing yummier and more familiar.  So what?  Well, there may be people in this country who can tinker with the Thanksgiving formula every year and haphazardly try some new recipe or introduce some new side dish, or allow guests to bring a dish, but I’m not one of them … I’ve been through too much tumult for that.  It’s bad enough that a divorce ripped my family in half, but on top of that, I’ve had to deal with a stepfather and two different stepmothers.  Throw a neighbor’s stepmother onto the pile and you’ve got some hard times.

Pre-stepparent, Thanksgiving was hard enough because my parents would fight over who got my brothers and me for the holiday.  They never communicated directly with each other on this; my brothers and I were used as arbitrators.  This is a horrible task to take on, so more often than not we’d just lie, and tell both parents they’d won out.  This only worked because each parent (for some reason) wanted to serve the meal at a different time.  So we’d dual-dinner, which took the traditional gut-busting Thanksgiving tradition to a new level that might have actually been physically dangerous.

Did my dad use Bell’s seasoning?  Nope.  He either didn’t know about it, or refused to turn his culinary effort into facsimile of my mom’s.  I can respect that.  (Adopting her formula would be like a new rock band doing nothing but covers.)  There was nothing unpleasantly foreign or alien about my dad’s Thanksgiving dinners because they captured his odd, sometimes scientific approach to cooking.  He had occasionally cooked dinner for us pre-divorce and it was usually something he invented; he tinkered at length over this wacky savory skillet-fried concoction halfway between an omelet and a pancake which he called a “doormat.”  For Thanksgiving he put the turkey in an oven-cooking bag which he called the “Buzzard Bag.”  It did come out more tender, though it tended to fall completely apart, like a gastronomic embodiment of deconstruction.

Stepparents hugely complicate this holiday meal tradition.  There was the stepfather who thought the turkey should be carved in the kitchen and served buffet-style, and the stepmother who actually served the meal without any f’ing gravy!  Can you believe that?  For all the grisly detail on these two meals, click here.

The other stepmother experience wasn’t as jarring, but still unhinged my brothers and me a bit.  This stepmother was (and is) actually a very cool lady.  My brothers and I liked her just fine, which is saying something given the unavoidably difficult dynamic of these bolted-on, imposter-ish fake parents, whose very existence creates a situation which cannot exist anywhere else in the animal kingdom except perhaps in brood parasitism (click here and search on “brood parasitism” for details).

This stepmother’s Thanksgiving dinners were basically okay except that she served these weird onion balls.  I don’t know the real name, but they were silvery onions, the diameter of a quarter, in this strange pearl-colored sauce with the exact viscosity of human saliva.  This was an important enough side dish to our stepmother that she had two platters of onion balls going around, and since we tended to pass them along pretty quickly (not really wanting to engage), they seemed to be constantly bobbing up in front of us, like there was no escape.  They didn’t taste bad or smell bad or anything, but they were just weird, like if James Bond’s suit had epaulettes, or Natalie Portman had a tail.  I thought I was the only one vaguely creeped out by this side dish until after the meal when one of my brothers said, “What the hell were those onion balls?” and we all immediately joined in, puzzling over them and bonding in our mutual bemusement.

The wilderness years

During my college years, it wasn’t always possible to make it home for Thanksgiving, and that’s where things got really rough.  One year, when my brother and I were renting an apartment in San Luis Obispo, our friend in the apartment next door came to our rescue.  Knowing we had nowhere to go, he invited us home with him.  Problem was, his home was broken, too, and this was his first Thanksgiving with his new stepmother.  She really couldn’t cook worth a damn—I think her stuffing was made with Wonder bread (that weird plastic-y white bread from the Rainbo Baking Company).  I mean, I’m not a fascist about good cooking or anything, and if a master chef who was not my mom made a great Thanksgiving meal, I could probably enjoy it, but this was pretty foul.  Even worse, the dad, whom my dad would certainly have labeled a “knuckle-dragging cretin” (or “KDC” for short) was watching football on TV the whole time, even during the meal.  I’m aware that millions of Americans do this every year, but that doesn’t make it okay.  I’d rather have a street mime performing in the dining room … at least they’re quiet.  The worst part was that our friend was in agony, between being ignored by his silent father and unctuously doted on by his stepmother, whom he clearly despised.

The next year, another neighbor friend—a guy old enough to be our father—promised to take us out for a gourmet Thanksgiving feast at The Cliffs At Shell Beach, a fancy resort.  His treat!  The idea of eating this family meal at a restaurant seemed a bit off, but at least (we figured) the food would be good.  Well, the afternoon dragged on as we all waited for this other kid our neighbor had invited, who had the car.  When it became apparent that this friend wasn’t going to show, we had to punt and head over to the nearby Sizzler Steakhouse.  They had a “special” buffet meal that did feature traditional Thanksgiving foods, but with a special Sizzler twist:  all the foods were loaded up with staggering amounts of salt.  On top of the bad food we suffered a low-grade bitterness:  the neighbor was bitter that his friend had flaked, and my brother and I were bitter at our friend, whom we suspected of hatching a half-baked scheme without getting actual buy-in from this (perhaps mythical) car-equipped friend.

The next year after that, another San Luis Obispo pal invited us home for Thanksgiving, and even drove down to pick me up from UC Santa Barbara.  Though I don’t remember anything about the food—which probably reflects well on it, under the circumstances—my brother and I experienced a new kind of pain.  Not only was the host family still intact, but they’d invited another unbroken family.  After the meal we all sat in the living room talking, and everybody was so convivial and non-dysfunctional, it kind of rubbed Geoff’s and my noses in the fact that our own family would never be together again.  (Even at gatherings of all the brothers plus one parent, there was no escaping the shadow of who was missing.)

So, the next year I said screw it and made a meal for my two UCSB roommates.  This was okay except the food sucked.  I wasn’t about to roast an entire turkey, so I did some chicken legs with canned cranberry sauce dumped over them.  I made Stove-top stuffing and used canned gravy, which I thought would be edgy and ironic but turned out just salty and MSG-y, taking me right back to that awful Sizzler’s meal.  On top of that, one roommate realized to his horror that he’d lost the ability to eat an entire meal in one sitting.  All his body could handle anymore was little snacks.  (He seemed to subsist almost entirely on sunflower seeds, which he ate like a little bird, flinging the shells everywhere until I trained him to store the seeds in one margarine tub and drop the shells into another.)

Return to normalcy

Now that I have a family of my own, I’m determined to get it right, and to build up traditions and institutions that provide the supreme comfort of predictability and reliability.  There’s a wonderful continuity in having my mom make the meal, the old way, not just to close up old wounds but because she’s such an awesome cook.  (Has my wife ever cooked the Thanksgiving meal on her own?  Yes, but she had the kindness and good sense to consult at length with my mom on the phone.  She completely nailed it, even the stuffing with its perfect blend of stale bread, stale homemade cornbread, celery, nuts, and—of course—Bell’s seasoning.)

So will I tolerate any innovations at all when it comes to this special meal?  Sure, as long as they’re introduced gradually and by an authorized family member.  Some years ago my mom introduced a relish tray which includes pickled herring in sour cream, and I now consider it non-optional.  And more recently she took to complementing her own homemade cranberry sauce and raw cranberry relish (both mandatory) with one little saucer of canned cranberry sauce, slid right out of the can so the corrugations of the can remain intact.  I don’t know how or why this innovation was adopted, but I’m completely okay with it, as long as I can wave an open box of Bell’s Seasoning in front of my daughter’s nose and have her say, “Mmmmm … that so smells like Thanksgiving.”

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From the Archives: Three Restaurant Reviews

Introduction

I hope you enjoyed reading about the food of London (http://www.albertnet.us/2009/09/food-of-london.html). Here, from my archives, are three companion pieces: reviews of American restaurants, from the high-end to the low-brow to the cutting edge of obscurely ethnic. I wrote the Sizzler review on October 2, 1990; the La Folie review on October 29, 1995; and the Adélie review on August 30, 2004. (A few of you might have read one or more of these in e-mail form at some point. Albertnet regrets this redundancy.)

Sizzler Steakhouse, 665 San Pablo Ave, Albany

Brett, my roommate, met Toru in the Japan-town in San Francisco. Naturally, they hit it off well, because Brett is trying to learn as much about the Japanese language and culture as possible, and Toru arrived here from Tokyo three weeks ago and seeks the same knowledge about America. I guess it isn’t surprising that Toru wanted to go to a steakhouse, but it caught Brett and me off guard.

Who really goes out for steak anymore, least of all in California? Our yellow pages has these sub-listings under restaurants: African, Brazilian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Creole-Cajun, Fast Food, Filipino, Hawaiian, Hofbrau, Hungarian, Indian, Indonesian, Iranian-Persian, Jewish Style, Mandarin, Moroccan, Soul Food, Sushi Bars, Thai, Turkish, Vegetarian, and Vietnamese, among others. Steakhouse is nowhere to be found. What would someone from Nebraska say? “Hungarian, Indian, Moroccan ‑‑ what the hell is this? I'm in America, dammit, I want American food. I want Black Angus!” We couldn't find anything. Then, with a creeping feeling of uneasiness, we remembered the hideous old stand‑by: Sizzler.

Sizzler is not an old stand‑by for people who occasionally require a steakhouse. It is a stand‑by for bike racers who are on the road and need to make sure they’ll get enough to eat. We never eat steak there; if we did, maybe we wouldn't hate it so much. Our torment comes at the hands of the salad bar. Actually, only once was it a salad bar; then it became a soup-and-salad bar, then a soup-salad-taco bar, then a soup-salad-taco-pasta bar, then a soup-salad-taco-pasta-dessert bar. Since the last time I’d been there (sometime last spring), they’ve added a hot-appetizer bar, and rather than buying up the rest of the world's supply of neon, they’ve changed the name of this monstrous freak of cuisine to “The Buffet Court.”

Upon entering a Sizzler, be it as far north as Salinas or as far south as Thousand Oaks, the feeling is always the same. It’s the same gut-wrenching nervous anticipation you get at the top of a roller‑coaster, right before plunging down—that moment when the hot dogs and cotton candy are festering in your stomach and beginning to crawl up your throat. But instead of the back‑ of-your-mind knowledge that nobody ever dies on roller coasters, the only comfort you can offer yourself at Sizzler is this: “I don’t have to eat anything I don’t want to. I can make it out of here if I just stick to the basics—salad, plain pasta, fruit.” But you know it’s hopeless. Walking down the aisle between the Hot Appetizer bar and the Salad Bar, all you can see to one side is french fries, fried zucchini, chicken nuggets; all you can see down the other is macaroni salad, potato salad, whipped chocolate pudding. (Why the pudding is considered a salad-bar item and not a dessert-bar item is beyond me. Maybe it’s classified like Jell-O—and believe me, this salad bar has plenty of Jell-O.)

Service, of course, is horrible at Sizzler. Since the two types of people that eat there (bike racers and senior citizens) always get the Buffet Court, the waiters can all but ignore them and get away with it. Once I complained about an earwig in my strawberries, and the waitress replied, “Well, I guess you got lucky.” In my fury, I cleared the restaurant by projectile-vomiting all over the pasta bar. (Okay, I didn’t really, but the part about the earwig is true.) The main job of a Sizzler waiter is to bring out water and the legendary Sizzler cheese-toast. If they forget the water, I am always one to complain because certain Sizzler items, like Tex-Mex Taco Meat, absolutely require something to wash them down. I’m more lenient on the cheese-toast, although I still like to gripe to Brett, “I hate Sizzler. They never bring me my cheese-toast. Never.”

I don't know what they eat in Japan, but Toru really seems to like the food here. Or maybe he’s being polite. I begin to ponder the message this restaurant must be giving him about America. The endless rows of food, routinely replaced and all for the taking, promote gluttony, for not only do they suggest an inexhaustible cornucopia, but appeal to our business sense; our own subconscious cost-benefit-analyses will not let us leave until we are completely full. Which at Sizzler, of course, means completely sick as well. It is an orgy of food, complete with uncomfortable diseases.

On only my seventh trip back to the Buffet Court, this time in search of anything bland that will calm my frantic stomach, I run into Brett. He must sense my pain, and his ghostly pallor suggests he feels it too, for he offers what he thinks will be an encouraging word: “Hey, guess what? The waiter just styled us out hard on the cheese-toast.” He looks confused when I roll my eyes. “I hate cheese-toast,” I tell him. Looking for something kinder to my stomach, I spy the melons. Actually, something else has drawn my attention to them: an old lady lacks the reach, the strength, and the salad-bar-tong dexterity to successfully pick up a slice of melon from the inner row of the salad bar. In fierce determination, she has pressed her right cheek against the protective glass canopy, onto which steam collects from her frantic breathing, along with an occasional drop of spittle flung from her lips by her incensed muttering. Partly out of sympathy and partly to get her out of the way, I help her to both kinds of melon (honeydew as well as . . . something else looking remarkably like honeydew but which she assures me is not). Then I help myself.

I figure the melon should really impress Toru, because I have learned from Brett that a melon in Japan costs anywhere from $30 to $100. I figure once Toru sees my melon wedges, he’ll flip out and forget his steak altogether. He seems unimpressed, though, which confuses me. I ask about the cost of melons in Japan, and he replies, “Yes, the melons are very, very expensive, but they are not something you buy. They are something to give to somebody, as a gift.” Now I have a sinking feeling about my measly wedges. In Japan, food is a ceremony, and means something beyond that which satisfies a glutton’s oral fixation and lust for grease. Here at Sizzler, food has even dropped below that level of sustenance; it represents something that will make you sick, every time.

Most items here seem like a good idea and even look appetizing, until you get them to the table. The cheese-toast, on the other hand, doesn't even look good: uniform slices of dry bread topped with an uncanny orange powder. As with everything, I eat it out of guilt. There are starving people in this world, I tell myself, and although I wish I were one of them right now, I can’t help the fact that I’ve committed myself to this meal and there’s no turning back. To rid my mouth of the horrible orange taste, I make one final trip, this one to the dessert bar. Here it is, ice cream on tap: chocolate, vanilla, or of course the disgusting hybrid (which has oozed into one brownish mass), with chocolate syrup in the ubiquitous recessed-stainless-steel-salad- bar-bucket. Syrup would turn my already-runny chocolate ice cream to soup, so I bite the bullet and top it with green Jell-O. When I finish eating, I am utterly ruined. Never again, I vow. Of course, I said that last time, and the time before. Toru, astonishingly, is happy with his meal. He explains that the steak alone would have cost $25 in Japan. All the same, the next time I want a steakhouse, I'm going over there.

La Folie, 2316 Polk Street, San Francisco

La Folie is a really fancy French restaurant just down the street from our apartment. Erin and I have walked by it many times, but never really thought about going in.

Well, on Friday night, we were both sitting, dazed, trying to recover from the grueling work week, when Erin said, “Let's go out to eat.” Well, in return for spending a month in Pasadena, my company had given me a TOP Certificate, which is a $100 bonus that must be spent on dinner for two. (It can be at any restaurant; the company simply pays me back.) Thing was, we didn’t want to waste it on a cheap restaurant where we could never run up that kind of bill, so Erin called La Folie for reservations. When she called it was about 6:30; they said the earliest they could get us in would be 9:30, unless we could get there within two or three minutes. Well, we made it.

I cannot offer any valuable comments about the decor, since I am still well within the cave of Plato’s Allegory. I was immediately impressed, however, by the staff. The waiter took his role far beyond that required by his profession. If normal waiters are well-mannered prostitutes, he was a lover. Even waiters at fine restaurants are often guilty of rolling their eyes while rattling off a list of specials memorized by rote; you can hardly blame them, since they have so much to remember anyway. But this fellow was different. Naturally we had all kinds of questions about the food, being culinary Philistines by the standards of this restaurant; as he answered our questions, he stared into our eyes, passionately delivering a gripping narrative of the splendor of each offering. I cannot recount his exact words, or even a vague summary of them, so specialized was his language. It included such things as cooking times, geographical origins of the components of the food, arrangement on the plate . . . his testimony was as heartfelt as if he had personally created every dish. At any moment I thought he might sink into a swoon. Needless to say, we ordered with confidence.

To start with, Erin had quail stuffed with paté de foie gras (duck liver) and I had roasted sea scallops. The scallops were arranged in a circle around the plate, alternated boy-girl-boy-girl with roast potatoes cut to exactly the same dimension as the scallops. In the middle was a smooth dome of pinkish salmon mousse, and there was a thin, dark, very tasty sauce around the whole thing. Absolutely exquisite. I can’t remember much about the presentation of Erin’s appetizer, since by the time we traded, the presentation had been severely altered. But it was also exquisite.

Then, we moved onto the soup. Erin had a butternut squash soup, very nice, and I had a bouillabaisse, which I’d say is the French version of cioppino, which in turn, I gather, is the Italian word for “fancy fish soup.” Highlights included a scallop the size of Manhattan, some other fish, and a lovely broth. Jutting proudly out of the bowl was a 10-inch crouton, with a large bulb of roasted garlic perched on the end. To my amazement, when I went to spread the garlic down the length of the crouton with my knife, it spread more smoothly than butter. Turns out it wasn't a bulb of garlic at all; it was mustard! I shouldn't have been surprised; I was in a French restaurant, after all, and this was a trompe l'oeil. (I feel the need here to throw around some fancy French terms. I hope you’re impressed.)

I should point out that I was not in the least disappointed to get mustard instead of garlic. It was not an overbearingly strong mustard like Grey Poupon (which is designed to stimulate the deadened taste buds of chain-smokers, such as you find in Paris), but a very mild yet distinctive mustard. The finest mustard, in fact, that I have ever had. The scallop in my soup, meanwhile, was not only the finest scallop I have ever had, but the finest thing I have ever put in my mouth. In fact, the experience of eating half of that scallop (the act of saving the other half being one of the most arduous trials my marriage has ever seen) was perhaps the most concentrated moment of pleasure I have ever experienced. Although acutely aware of the elegance of my surroundings, I could not suppress a whimper of sheer delight. Again, I can’t remember Erin’s soup as well as mine, except to say that it was buttery and nutty and very fine indeed.

Then we had a sorbet. It was served in something like a martini glass, although after a brief discussion we concluded that it must have been a special glass specially designed for sorbet. I thought about testing to see if the glass was crystal, which is done by flicking it in much the same fashion as you flick a schoolmate’s cold, red ear right after recess on a cold winter morning. However, I feared that if the glass were indeed crystal, I would know because I would send shards of it flying in Erin’s face, and we’d owe the restaurant gobs of money for a replacement.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the sorbet. It was not sherbert, or even sherbet. It had basically the composition of a snow cone. The flavor, however, put it on the opposite end of the spectrum from its oversweet cousin. It was the most vivid, pronounced grapefruit flavor I have ever encountered. Basically, they’d managed to compress the total collective flavor of a crate of grapefruits into about a tablespoon of crushed ice. My palette was instantly purged of a lifetime of accumulated flavors; indeed, I suddenly knew the inside of my mouth more intimately than I had since birth.

The entrees? I had the black sea bass. By the black sea bass, I mean that this was the only black sea bass that has ever lived. (As soon as I ordered it, they took it off the menu.) Well, actually, perhaps it wasn’t that unique, but it was still something special. As soon as I ordered it, the waiter gave instructions to an expert fisherman, who went out in a small skiff to the deep waters of the Pacific to catch the fish. (As I began the soup course, I envisioned him arriving, out of breath, at the back of the kitchen with a giant pail of water, having brought back his bounty alive. Naturally, the restaurant knew that storing an exotic fish in other than its natural environment would spoil the flavor.)

I cannot describe how the fish was prepared because the chef had worked some kind of magic on it. Magnificent. It was served with this special rice that was so inexplicably good that I must compare it to Mom’s stuffing: how could anything so simple be so delicious? (I don't want to hear any answers from dieticians, either). Sprawling lazily across the plate were several stalks of the Platonic ideal of asparagus. The plate was also festooned with these large, thick slabs of space-alien mushrooms--shitakes and portobellos and other bizarre varieties more savory than meat. These, I now recall, had also been part of the apotheosis of the appetizers.

Erin, meanwhile, had the duck. Oh, it was magnificent. Thin slices, rather rare (by which I mean to describe how they were cooked and how seldom anybody gets such fine duck). She also had an amazing rice, along with carrots and an unidentifiable vegetable that we think might have been hearts of palm. I ate half her entree myself (we had made this arrangement early on, and held to it through all five courses, even though upon tasting each course, I was tempted to call off the deal, since nothing, I reasoned, could be better than what I was eating; still, I managed to take the gamble each time, and it was always worth it).

I really liked the duck. I mean, I know that's not profound or anything; I mean, heck, we all love duck. But this went much more beyond that. Part of my love of eating duck comes from the very concept of eating such irritating birds. I remember the ones who lived at Viele Lake who turned the sidewalk green all the way from the Rec Center to Fairview High School with their feces. I also remember how they used to charge me, hissing, just for trespassing on “their” land, and how they almost refused to cower when I chased them across the lawn on my mountain bike. But my general hatred of living ducks can be discounted in this case, for this was obviously a more refined breed of duck. I imagine it was a more serene, less bilious duck, who grew up in an Eddie Bauer catalog, eating a balanced diet of gourmet croutons and polenta. I’m sure it died in peace, in full knowledge of the gourmet afterlife that is every prize duck’s mortal dream.

After finishing the main course, we were feeling great. So great, in fact, that we were pushing the edge of the envelope for feeling great and I, anyway, feared that dessert might push me over the edge. It seems that every time I stay for dessert at a nice restaurant, I end up ordering the Great Ungodly Godlike Sinfully Rich Chocolate Blasphemy. It’s always good, but it’s always too much of a good thing. But of course this menu was more original and creative than that. It offered an assortment of exotic things; I almost ordered a dessert based on figs, for the sake of being outlandish. But the waiter swayed me towards the pear strudel. (Again, I marvelled at the waiter’s passion for the food; he lovingly described the desserts with the same zest I would have in recommending Simplex Retrofriction shifters.) Erin ordered the apple Charlotte.

Only when the strudel arrived did it hit me: this is a French restaurant, and nobody does pastry like the French. It was warm, of course, but not that death-warmed-over-in-the-microwave warm you get at diners. It must have been baked to order. Twin wedges met to form a tower; powdered sugar was sprinkled lightly over the rim of the plate. A star graced the plate, composed of varicolored petals of some exotic sauce. Erin’s dessert, too, was graced with pretty droplets. I expected these to be mainly cosmetic touches, like different colors of frosting on a cake. This misconception, however, was brought to my attention when Erin tasted one of her droplets and absolutely squealed with delight. Her droplet had been caramel: not like Brachs, but like La Folie had just invented caramel. Another droplet was some kind of lemon cream. I began tasting my drops, and was elated to discover that each had, condensed magically within it, the entire flavor of a mortal dessert. It became immediately obvious to me that Willy Wonka was back there in the kitchen, having found his true calling. My dessert only got more amazing from there. The pastry was so perfect and flaky and light, the filling so honest and unsweetened, that I almost broke down and cried for sheer joy.

Naturally, such a meal came at a price. But, partially because my work bonus covered more than half of it, I was not in the least disgruntled by the bill. After all, think of how much sacrifice the French people have made over the centuries, eschewing convenience and doggedly pursuing great cuisine, just to develop the kinds of delicacies we had just eaten. It is a wonderful thing that we can stroll into a restaurant, mere blocks from our home, and suddenly experience the culmination of centuries of passionate devotion to fine food.

Adélie, 1109 Fillmore Street, San Francisco

You can have all the charms of your run-of-the-mill restaurants in downtown San Francisco or the Mission District, but wouldn't you love to eat at Adélie Restaurant and watch the lively action—complete with a sidewalk scuffle—in the Western Addition?

Don't be scared to visit. Adélie (named after the Adélie Coast, a region of Antarctica near George V Coast, under French sovereignty since 1938) offers an affordable meal. The prices are all over the place—anywhere from a $1.99 ice taco to a $10.25 frozen entrée. It strikes me as a new place that’s still working out the kinks. The ambiance is sparse, yet kind of endearing (and I’m not a big ambiance guy anyway). There are black and white photocopies of Antarctic landscapes on the wall, and other photocopies are embedded in the glass dining tables. And while the fluorescent lighting and images of bleak tundra are depressing, there are handmade needle work and ceramic displays that do warm up the place a bit.

I think the waiter is also the owner, the cashier, the busboy, the chef, and possibly even the sous-chef. He explained that the restaurant was an integration of his Antarctic background with his wife’s Eskimo heritage. He was emphatic about this “hybrid project” not being fusion. Rather, he said, the dishes reflect “flavors of the old family recipes that shouldn't be altered.” Whatever, dude.

The Coats Land Snow Mixto for $9.25 completely floored me. The mix of meat and seafood including seal, penguin, walrus, and tern was nicely chilled and flavored with tart snow and fresh ice. I warn you, it might be a bit cold for the faint-hearted. If steaming biscuits are more your scene, this might turn you off a bit. Myself, I thought it was great, but then I once ate “roll mops” after being caught in the snow on a bike ride up Mount Diablo. (What, you haven't heard of a roll mop? It’s raw herring wrapped around a dill pickle, a Dutch delicacy.)

The Antarctic Pabellon for $10.25 is shredded gull brined with slush and served with pickled gull eggs, steamed ice, black gravel and a little pile of yellow snow. The presentation of the dish was simple and the aroma was enticing without being overwhelming. The gull was tender and smoky, but I began to lose interest after a few bites. Nothing about the ice or gravel really stood out either. The entrée felt like, well, discomfort food, and I had the vague feeling that someone's grandmother does a better version.

I can't vouch for the authenticity of Adélie (since I don't know squat about Antarctic cuisine) but I was pretty impressed that they have seven varieties of imported blubber, listed on their own section of the menu with a little blurb about each one. The blubbers come from various Antarctic regions, from Bellinghausen Sea to Coats Land to Australian Arctic Territory. I was tempted to try one or two, but since Erin and the kids had stuffed themselves on waffles and bacon at breakfast, I knew I wouldn’t get any help from them, and I wasn't going to tackle a whole plate of blubber on my own. (I flew solo with chicken feet at Dim Sum back in the day and I’m not making that mistake again.)

Overall, Adélie did hold its own as a nice place to grab a bite. The service was caring and the food was decent, if a bit uncomfortable. The neighborhood is a bit on the spotty side—there was a fistfight right outside our window during the meal, which set a bad example for my bored children—but who cares? Just mind your own business and enjoy the experience. Or, if you just can’t relax in that environment, get your meal to go—Adélie is one of the few restaurants I’ve seen that still sends meals out in Styrofoam containers (though I can’t imagine why, since the food is all stone cold to begin with).